Memoir Project

Whether or not one has lived an exceptional or dramatic life, we inherently understand that writing memoir—whether it’s a book, blog, or just a letter to a child - is the single greatest portal to self-examination. Stop treading water in writing exercises or hiding behind “writer’s block” and learn how to write with intent. Marion Roach Smith’s disarmingly frank but wildly fun tactics offer you simple and effective guidelines that work. Your legacy beings now.

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. "The days are long, but the years are short," she realized. "Time is passing, and I'm not focusing enough on the things that really matter." In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

Hugh van Cuylenburg was a primary school teacher volunteering in northern India when he had a life-changing realisation: despite the underprivileged community the children were from, they were remarkably positive. By contrast, back in Australia Hugh knew that all too many children struggled with depression, social anxieties and mental illness. His own little sister had been ravaged by anorexia nervosa. How was it that young people he knew at home, who had food, shelter, friends and a loving family, struggled with their mental health, while these kids seemed so contented and resilient?

Growing up in a trailer park, by her 21st birthday Ash was a jobless, homeless orphan with only $26 to her name. But even with the odds stacked against her, she changed her fortune forever by starting her million-dollar business from the backseat of her car. Ash gave the finger to convention, blazed her own path, and finally found work she loved. And she wants to show you how she did it.

CIVIL: Life After the Foreign Legion is the author's follow-up to Appel: A Canadian in the French Foreign Legion. During his recent return to France, he shares with you his past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Algeria as a security contractor and more.

Nedd Brockmann isn’t afraid to dream big. Fresh after running fifty marathons in fifty days, the twenty-three-year-old had an idea: a 4000-kilometre run across Australia, averaging 100 kilometres per day with the aim of completing it in the fastest known time of 43 days. He wasn’t chasing fame or public recognition. He just wanted to test his limits and raise a million dollars for homelessness in the process.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none.

The first collection of Timothy Leary's (1920-1996) selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness.

What can you learn from the most successful companies in the world? The Spanx Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled entrepreneur Sara Blakely to dominate the shapewear industry and become a billionaire.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives.

From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in. Self-taught, introspective, and from a boring farm town, he couldn’t relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay and overweight, he got used to diminishing himself. But little by little, he started learning from all the strange, lonely outcasts in history, and he started to feel hope. In this collection of personal essays, Guy talks about finding a sense of belonging at Berkeley, being typecast as the “Sassy Gay Friend”, and more....

A memoir of second chances, healing, and how rescuing a dog rescued me Having never had a dog of his own before, Don was not prepared for what it meant to adopt one of the most behaviorally difficult rescues in the shelter. But something about Barbie, a mutt that everyone had given up on and so fearful and unresponsive that she was within days of being put down, convinced Don to open his home and his heart for the first time to a canine companion, changing both of their lives forever.

Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project is a short biography and history that tells the story of the man and his mission; his loves and his losses; and his rise and fall.

"War Diary: The Diary of Mike Rogers" is a poignant historical record that chronicles the experiences of a young boy, Mike Rogers, during World War II. The diary begins in 1939, capturing the tense atmosphere as Britain enters the war. It provides detailed daily entries that cover the significant and mundane aspects of wartime life, from the fear of air raids and the impact of rationing to personal reflections and observations of everyday occurrences.

Richard Noble has had the ambition all his adult life to see Britain excel in engineering on the world stage. His achievements in the highly insecure world of record-breaking emphatically demonstrate his commitment to his cause. In his book Take Risk! he tells the extraordinary stories of his 11 projects in record-breaking and aviation that all saw people and companies go out of their way to join him in his exciting endeavours - and take risk.

One woman's vicarious sexual and emotional adventure told in a no-holds-barred, unapologetic, and compelling way. The project was simple: Robin Rinaldi, a successful magazine journalist, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was forty-four, or that she was married to a man she'd been in love with for 18 years.

It's the most shocking, unknown tale of our era: a defense contractor who bribed US Navy officers with cash, prostitutes, and luxury items in return for multimillion-dollar deals. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With exclusive access to Leonard Glenn Francis himself, Fat Leonard reveals the true story of the misogynistic men at the heart of the navy and the brave women who brought them down.

The Soul of a Child places brilliant educator and reformer Maria Montessori in the context of her time. It examines the relationships, inner struggles, and inspirations of Montessori, a woman with heart, empathy, and resilience. As a strong woman who lived through two world wars, the rise of fascism in Spain and Italy and the dawn of the nuclear age, she remained undeterred in her faith in the possibility of positive change through education. Her life spanned both the joys of innovation and the horrors of destruction of the 20th century.

An essential Burning Man origin story, Built to Burn chronicles the wild uncertainty and creative chaos of the early days in the desert, when the event's future was under constant threat and the organizers were making everything up as they went along. It's a tale of struggle and survival and of friends made and friends lost as Coyote and his misfit crew battle raging storms, crazed livestock, angry townsfolk, and each other, locking horns with the real-life cowboys, Indians, outlaws, and outcasts of Nevada's high-desert frontier.